The Good Soldier

Graham Greene called this novel of the Edwardian upper classes "one of the 15 or 20 greatest novels produced in English in our century," while narrator John Dowell introduces it as "the saddest story I ever heard." At the fashionable German spa town Bad Nauheim, two wealthy couples—the British Ashburnhams and the American Dowells—meet for yearly reunions between 1902 and 1914. As their story moves back and forth in time, in Dowell's unreliable recollection, the fragile surface propriety of the society in which these four characters live is ruptured, revealing deceit, hatred, infidelity, and betrayal.